* Posts by Joe-Thunks

17 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2023

Data watchdog tells off outsourcing giant for scanning staff biometrics despite 'power imbalance'

Joe-Thunks

Pathetic response from the ICO

It's a useless quango led by the limpest of limp-wristed nonentities. It has no credibility. The ICO would win the 'waggiest finger' medal for the so-called work it does.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Joe-Thunks

The law is not everything

-- He went on to highlight the UK's strict rules around hosting and propagating harmful content online, such as terrorist material, that are already in place.

As with illegal drugs, this shows the limits of the law versus reality. Making something illegal does not stop it, nor is it much of a deterrent to those people who are intent on crime.

-- one in four exhibiting illegal behaviors

That means the law is probably misguided. Criminalising a quarter of any part of society is stupid off the top of the scale. Nor will locking up a few to send a message, or words to that effect, have any effect.

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Joe-Thunks

Related story

My bank (HSBC) uses voice recognition to help identify customers on the phone. I recently called them. The line was apparently bad. I could hear my interlocutor very well, but they could apparently not hear me very well. I had to say my postcode several times until they repeated it back correctly. Problems with the letter 'H'.

This puzzled me. Is the voice recognition able to discern the sound better than a human. Or is there some fuzziness going on, where somebody could just sound like me and get away with it?

The most 2024 things to do are laying off staff and eyeing up AI – Mozilla's doing both

Joe-Thunks

Re: Mozilla is a dead man walking

You should work for Mozilla. They don't listen either. And look where it's got them. What is wrong with people that they cannot give a good reason to use something, other than it is not something else?

You should buy this Ford. Why? Because it's not GM. Salesman of the Year award coming up.

Joe-Thunks

Mozilla is a dead man walking

Despite the vocal minority of web users who lecture the rest of us about Firefox being a "better" browser, the market says otherwise. Firefox is the Betamax or OS/2 of today, but for different reasons. Firefox was never technically "excellent". It was a memory hog back in the day, and they never solved that. I occasionally try Firefox and there is nothing in there that makes me say "gee, I really needed that". It's a pity, but Mozilla went down so many side streets and alleyways, while ignoring the high street.

If anyone can give me a compelling reason to use Firefox, and not "it's not Chrome", I am prepared to listen. Don't double down and say "that is the reason, it is not Chrome". That's not good enough.

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

Joe-Thunks

This: In response to the report, the Cabinet Office has said all contracts are awarded following an open and fair process, and decisions are "rigorously scrutinized."

Let me not quote Mandy Rice-Davies for you.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Joe-Thunks

An easy solution

If caught using AI, fail the student. Students are supposed to do their own work. Copying and pasting from ChatGPT does not count. If it turns out later that a graduate used AI, cancel the degree.

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

Joe-Thunks

According to Occam's Razor

And Nostradamus too. It is written in the stars. Some runes were cast. Divining rods crossed.

It will go wrong. It will take years longer than planned. It will cost n times the original estimate. The cost benefits will not be realised.

Reports, thousands of pages of blather, will be written by people who don't understand what they are writing about. They can be summarised to one sentence: this should not have happened.

The people who decided to do it, like Elvis, have long left the building.

Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail

Joe-Thunks

Note to US district judge Jesse Furman

The only crime here was the exposure of American crimes against the world. If Schulte had been Russian or Iranian or Cuban or North Korean or pickyourenemy, the USA would be lauding him as a great symbol of justice.

Welcome to 1984, where justice is imprisoning those who expose wrongdoing.

UK lawmakers say live facial recognition lacks a legal basis

Joe-Thunks

As if it matters

Britain is an exceptionally poor example of a democracy. It has always been so. The great unwashed ruled by the people who always seem to be in power.

DEA nabs $150M from dark web drug lord based... in Coventry

Joe-Thunks

Not a Sackler = jail time

If he was connected, he could have just paid a fine and walked away.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Joe-Thunks

Re: tracefs?

Linux is not UNIX. Linux today is about making things more cumbersome and complicated than they need to be, and at the same time making it slower than it used to be.

Joe-Thunks

Re: A better long-term approach...

What an idiot you are. Open source software is not yours to weaponise.

Akira ransomware gang says it stole passport scans from Lush in 110 GB data heist

Joe-Thunks

There we go again - Passport scans are routinely collected

There should be a time limit on this. After somebody has been "verified", the scan should be deleted permanently. A fine of £10,000 for every scan retained if it is not deleted.

All these companies siphon up data, keep it stored insecurely. Then they get to wash their hands of the problems they cause by having poor security.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Joe-Thunks

Re: " the impact of platform rules and of relentless marketing."

-- Firefox is completely free, you can compile and customize the browser and it includes all the codecs you're going to need in the source.

Ah. The open source argument. Seriously. Nearly everyone does NOT compile Firefox from source. They just want a browser which works. Firefox is not a good experience. Then you blame the users who use Chrome for being stupid (rewording "wouldn't understand"). No. Chrome is a good browser. It works. And it works better than Firefox.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Joe-Thunks

Shame on the Reg

-- The FOSS Desk endorses the suggested 2024 new year's resolution to switch browser to Firefox, whatever your OS.

Endorsing the horribleness that Firefox has become is not good. Sorry, but it just doesn't wash. Firefox lost out years ago. The other current article about Firefox says this is due to "relentless marketing [by Chrome/Google]". It's not. The truth is Firefox is not a very good browser. The last decent version of "Firefox" was Netscape Communicator.

And as for packaging up Firefox to make it easier to install, that's just an indication of how bad package management is on Linux. After all these years...

How hard is your network really, comms watchdog asks telcos

Joe-Thunks

Honest answer from $telco

Well, we were going to use Huawei. Their code was audited and found not to have backdoors. But then the government took it up the back passage from the USA. We're compelled to use something else. If we could possibly avoid it we would not use anything from the USA as that has been shown over and over to have security holes and backdoors which somehow get forgotten about. So if you want to talk security, let us use products which have been audited rather than leaking sieves.